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11/05/2006 - Green Eggs and...?
So, this rambling isn’t really that humorous, or insightful, it’s just…odd.I wish to preface this story by pointing out two things: First, that I grew up in the City of Madison and am not or never was a farmer and haven’t been exposed to many farm-type things. Secondly, although I am a fisherman and a hunter, and have seen odd, gory, bloody things, some things still surprise me. Now, on with the story.
Every so often my fiancée and I go to her aunt and uncle’s house, which is about an hour and a half drive from our home in Madison, in the quiet and quaint little town of Muscoda. They are great fun to hang out with, and, well, they are always well stocked with beer and have a hot tub. I have been under the weather this weekend, and after being invited over, I figure a nice soak in the hot tub might help me get rid of this cold that I have, so off to Tracy’s aunt and uncle’s place we go.
This particular weekend, Tracy’s aunt and uncle are house sitting for some friends. These friends have a little hobby farm with a pig, some geese, and chickens. Every morning, Tracy’s aunt has to go over to the house, check on the dogs (who are very sweet and have their own little places to sleep on the porch and stay outside the whole time), and collect the eggs from the chickens. So Tracy’s aunt tells us this story of how she is collecting the eggs one day and one of them is a bit different. Most commercially available eggs are white. Most farm-fresh eggs are brown. But this egg is neither white, nor brown. It is green. Yes, green. An actual, bona fide, real, natural egg with a green shell. Now, again, for a farmer, this may be an every day occurrence. But for me, this is truly out of the ordinary. Green eggs only exist in Dr. Seuss books, right? Apparently not. Maybe Mr. Geisel got his idea from growing up on a farm. Or maybe he grew up in the city and had an experience similar to this one. Who knows…
So we spend the night there, and have a great time in the hot tub with some beer. Now it’s Sunday morning and time to go home. Of course, Tracy’s aunt sends us home with some of the farm-fresh eggs and Tracy, being the girl that she is, has to have the green one. Now this oddity of nature is in our fridge. Maybe it’s contagious and all the other eggs will turn green. Of course I’m sure it will taste just fine, and no, I don’t think it will actually be green inside. In any case…
I present to you, the green egg:
10/28/2006 - Consumption of the Noodley One?
So I’ve decided to start a new page on my site. Well, my site itself isn’t really that old — I think I’ve had it up for 3 weeks at the most, at this point. Anyway, these ramblings have nothing to do with beer. They are random, and more blog-like than anything else.So, the other day, I decided to cook dinner. Now, you see, my fiancée and I generally eat relatively healthy. Home made foods; fruits and veggies; not a ton of pre-processed stuff, etc. I was searching through the cupboard, as I had a craving for Mac-and-cheese. Well, we didn’t have any. So, I found two boxes of Chicken Helper (copyright Betty Crocker :) ). I thought to myself. “We haven’t had this in a while, why not…?” I got some chicken thawing, and read the box: “Better if used by May 2, 2000.” Hmm.. This is older than my relationship with my fiancée. Maybe I should check the other box we have…It’s exactly the same type of Chicken Helper, and the expiration is only a year ago, not 6… let’s use this one.
The pictures on the front of the boxes are even the same, only the newer box, on the right, has the picture of the product enlarged. The irony of this shall be evident shortly.
I open the boxes, both of them. The sauce packet of the newer box feels lighter. And the noodles seem to be fewer as well. At this point, I review the boxes again. The older box has a net weight of 7.9 ounces:
The newer box has a weight of 6.8 ounces:
Hmmm. Either the older box has had some noodle reproduction going on, or Betty Crocker has utilized the classic “shrinking product” cost cutting technique. Yep, they’ve cut an entire one and one-tenth ounces from their box. After some careful review of the additions and the nutrition information, I find that there is less milk added to the newer package when cooking, and the newer package had fewer overall calories as a dry product. However, perplexingly, the two packages have the same caloric content and same serving size when fully prepared. Lemme get this straight. The newer package contains less sauce, fewer noodles, weighs over an ounce less, has fewer additions, yet somehow the end result is the same serving size with exactly the same caloric content? This constitutes some sort of temporal anomaly in the space-time continuum. Or maybe it’s just another analogous situation to Any Rooney’s gripe about the shrinking size of coffee cans.
In either case, the end result is still the Same – Chicken Helper: A conglomeration of your own chicken, milk and butter combined with pre-packaged noodles and sauce that, no matter what year it’s from or variety it is, always comes out the same — Gloppy shit that tastes like cheap cardboard noodles in some sort of white-goo sauce. A sorry excuse for “Look honey, I cooked dinner for us tonight.” My fiancée makes fresh home baked cookies, great curry, excellent chili and the best damned pumpkin pie ever, and all I can do is make this sorry-ass-no-good-excuse-for-dinner shit? It’s a damn good thing she likes my beer…